For a business to succeed in the online and offline marketplace, you need a comprehensive digital marketing plan in place. The world of digital marketing offers plenty of opportunities to help businesses find the most effective techniques to reach their target customers and increase revenue. It also helps non-tech-savvy entrepreneurs to stay on top of social media activities and gain more online exposure.
Creating a marketing plan with no clear objective is a sure-fire way to waste time, money, and effort. If you have no idea what you want out of your marketing campaign, you can’t expect great results from your marketing strategies.
Clear and strategic marketing objectives are critical for a sound marketing plan. If you’re working with an SEO agency, having an objective will help them implement the best marketing strategies consistent with your corporate goals.
While creating a marketing objective sounds easy, many companies fail when forming a realistic marketing objective. To prevent this from happening, we’ll discuss what marketing objectives are about, ways to create one, and real-life examples.
What are marketing objectives?
Marketing objectives serve as actionable goals designed to provide direction with clear and detailed strategies. But creating a marketing objective is not just about writing down the objectives of your marketing campaigns. It has to be aligned and tied to the overall goals of your business, whether short-term or long-term.
For instance, most business owners want to expand their brand by targeting a new customer base. Their possible marketing objectives would revolve around building an online presence or launching a product campaign to raise awareness about the brand.
Since we’re talking about objectives, it requires a specific outline of how you’re planning to achieve your company’s end goal. So, if the endpoint is to reach a new market, the marketing objective should support that. Together, the objectives will identify the best marketing strategy to achieve the company’s goal.
Key points to establish marketing objectives
To ensure an effective marketing objective, you need to follow the SMART framework. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-based. Following this approach will help manage marketing campaigns effectively and determine the success rate of your objectives.
- Specific. The objective should be outlined and defined clearly. Instead of simply stating that you want to boost sales, explain how much you’re expecting, both in dollars and percentage.
- Measurable. You need an outline to measure the success of your campaigns. Benchmarks and key performance indicators (KPI) monitor the progress of your campaign and provide data if you’re on the right track to attaining those objectives. If you want to boost brand awareness, measure it based on social followers, mentions, and organic searches.
- Achievable. The objectives should be attainable and reasonable for the company to attain. While it’s great to have high standards, remember to keep the goals within your means and resources. Outline the required steps to know if a specific objective is really achievable.
- Relevant. The objective should be related to the brand mission and the purpose of your company. Consider how the benchmark will affect the entire marketing strategy.
- Time-based. Your objective should have a realistic time frame for achieving a specific benchmark. The time frame may vary based on your objective and the work required to reach the objective.
Examples of marketing objectives
Marketing objectives are an essential part of developing a marketing strategy. Digital marketing offers plenty of marketing strategies that come with specific goals. The challenging part is to choose which one can help you reach your objective.
Increase brand awareness
If you have a limited customer base or a new service or product, your marketing objective should focus on growing brand awareness and expanding market reach to boost sales.
Increase sales
If you‘re selling an expensive product or a part of a competitive marketplace, your objective is to increase revenue and the number of customers in the sales pipeline to convert them into successful leads.
Enhance online presence
If your product has a poor online footprint, your goal is to enhance the brand’s online presence on social media platforms and search engine results.
Promote a new product or service
If you’re planning to grow your product line, your objective should involve the successful launching of the product or service and reaching the target number of sales.
Setting a marketing objective is critical to the success of any business. Without a clear goal, it’s difficult to choose an effective marketing strategy and meet the needs of your target consumers. A successful marketing campaign begins with a measurable and specific marketing objective. As you create your marketing objective, take note of the key points above to help you come up with a strategic plan to obtain successful conversions for your business.
